1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to human interface with information systems, and, more particularly, to a computer system for inspecting and modifying data contained within an information system.
2. History of the Prior Art
Two results of the rapid increase in available facilities with huge capacities for data storage and with enhanced speeds for manipulating data are the accumulation of vast complexes of information spaces and the interconnection of networks of such spaces. The term "semantic network" is used herein for a set of information organized along a particular conceptual line, while the term "cyberspace" is used herein for a large pool of complex information organized along virtually every conceptual line that can be thought of. One of the problems associated with such huge cyberspaces is how to determine optimum ways for human operators to interact with meaningful subsets of information contained within a cyberspace. Although humans are wonderful cognitive processors of information, they rapidly become saturated and ineffectual when confronted with too much information at one time.
In the management and use of large cyberspaces of information, the principal human problem is how to enable people to navigate through the information space focusing on specific information without losing their awareness of information at the global level. More particularly, there is the problem of how to enable a user to interact efficiently with the information contained in a large information system. A user must be able to rapidly inspect, select, and modify data within a system if this data is to be widely and effectively used.
While highly skilled programmers and other such users may be able to meaningfully interpret lines of code on a display screen, most users cannot. For this reason, application programs have often incorporated various types of graphical displays to communicate information about the internal condition and operation of the information system. Such graphical display interface systems enable the user to make program selections and provide other input related to the information processing activity. One particularly useful tool for interfacing with an information system has been the graphical symbols called "icons."
An icon is a small pictorial representation of some larger set of information. Icons have been used for many years as a way to graphically indicate certain information about the contents of a system or state of operation. Generally, icons fit into one of two categories:static or dynamic. A static icon is simply a picture of something that indicates a condition within a computer system. For example, it could be an image of a window within a windowing system, which has been closed down and put into the background of the display. Alternatively, it could be a picture of an unopened document in a word processor type of information system. Overall, it is a simple, static picture on a display screen, connoting certain encoded information in the mind of a human operator.
A second kind of icon employed in the past is also in the static category, although it incorporates a certain amount of dynamism. This dynamism reflects a certain activity in the information or in the condition of the system represented by the icon. For example, one icon employed in a windowing system appears when a window is closed as a shrunken representation of the window. If some new text appears in the window while it is closed down, the text is also represented in the icon, but in a proportionally smaller size. That is, some additional information appears in the icon when changes occur in the system, but that information is treated as a change going on in the background, to which the operator is paying little attention.
A related type of icon, which is basically static but which incorporates a certain amount of dynamism, is the animated icon. For example, in one application program, a trash can grows in size as the user discards files without emptying the trashcan's contents. While only three actual sizes of icons are used--a normal slim size, an intermediate size, and a very full size--they are displayed sequentially to connote growth to the user. Each of the individual graphical images comprising the animated icon is static in that it is fixed in size; the composite appears to move only as the result of an animated illusion.
Highly sophisticated animated icons have also been used to provide graphical interfaces for computer simulations of complex physical systems. By way of illustration, numerous editorially selectable animated icons are used in the interactive, inspectable, simulation-based instructional steam power plant system described in "Graphic Interfaces for Simulation," Advances in Man-Machine Systems Research, Vol. 3, pp. 129-163 (JAI Press, Inc. 1987). Each of these icons is directly connected to respond to an associated variable within the mathematical simulation algorithm to indicate the existence of particular conditions within the simulated physical system.
The icon is an extremely useful tool because it is designed to trigger within the mind of the human operator concepts that quickly communicate the contents or operation of the information system. Most icons are either static or animated and are connected so that they respond directly to either an information system condition or a variable within a simulation algorithm. If an icon could instead be coupled to a means for moving through and inspecting the contents of an information system and graphically depicting the results of that inspection, it could be used to great advantage in communicating information about large cyberspaces of information. The present invention proposes such an automatically generated icon system for enabling a user to interface with data contained within an information system.